Inspecting hard to reach and inaccessible structures is a costly, time consuming, and potentially dangerous undertaking. In particular, inspecting steel surfaces including elevated pipes, beams, tanks, vessels and other metallic surfaces or structures for flaws, such as corrosion and/or weld failures present challenges. These assets usually either go uninspected for prolonged periods of time or require bundling scaffolding to be able to reach the areas desired to be inspected. The erection and use of scaffolding introduces a safety hazard in the potential for falls, consumes a lot of time and labor to prepare and is also significantly costly.
While certain robotic inspection vehicles are available, these vehicles have many shortcomings. For example, typical robotic inspection vehicles are highly specialized and different vehicles must be purchased for each application. While one vehicle may be able to inspect the walls of a storage tank, that same vehicle is not likely suitable for inspection of pipes. Furthermore, different functions such as visual inspection, ultrasonic inspection and gas sensing require different robots and systems. Further, conventional inspection vehicles are limited in that they typically require a tethered connection which limits their ability to be used to access areas with close-by obstacles (e.g. joints) without getting stuck and having their umbilical cords (tethered) entangled.
The present invention addresses these and other problems.